Historian, Former Ambassador, Human Rights Activist

I received this email today. It is a bit disjointed below because I have removed any detail that might help the Uzbek government identify the sender. It really cheered me up on a morning when I needed it badly!

Dear Craig,

I was going to buy your book ‘Murder in Samarkand’ on the way home in Books etc a week ago as I heard a lot about it lately but unfortunately they did not have any in their store. Today I asked my friend to find it for me and luckily he found it in Waterstones. When I came home the book was waiting for me. I started reading the book and suddenly after about 30-35 pages I noticed my friend staring at me with a really surprised expression on his face”..I was crying, I had proper tears in my eyes. I was amazed that your book is so well written that it made me go through a lot of things in the past that I had back home in Uzbekistan.

Let me tell you a little bit about myself, I come from …, my name is …, (this is my English name, the Uzbek one is hard to pronounce) and am ”. I now have been in the UK for … I live in …. …made me learn a lot of stuff including English. It is amazing place despite quite a few downsides. I did my degree back home in but never managed to find a job in this field as all political places like Ministries etc are mostly … I had a pretty good job and life back home but overall cultural, political and economical strain made me run away at least to have some break and live a stress free life for a little while.

I can not remember exactly now but I think I saw you quite a few times on the TV. I might be wrong but I think you could speak Russian pretty fluently. Things did not change a lot since you left Uzbekistan. Everything is almost the same unfortunately. I am really sorry for all bad things you had to go through in Uzbekistan. I wish it was a place that I could be proud of. All educated people were aware of what was going on when you suddenly had to leave Uzbekistan.

I would like to thank you for writing a book about this completely lost and forgotten part of the world.

One thought on “Moments that make it worthwhile”

I greatly enjoyed reading your book. I think it is valuable, too, for what it shows of how the war on terror is conducted.

Most people believe that somewhere in this whole farce our government is behaving with some honour. Your book starts to peel away the layers. Maybe some day, hopefully soon, people will begin to realise how very deep the corruption goes.

I have to say that I find it frustrating that the discussion continues, even on your blog, into the whys and wherefores of terrorism. This is exactly as designed, and the longer it goes on the further we will be from the truth. There is no solution to the problem being discussed because it is a chimera, that was created to justify all the murder, looting and tightening of security.

The psychological effect of fear is to make us reluctant to believe the worst of our own and enthusiastic to denigrate the oppressor. Thus, we are easily manipulated in a terror scenario.

"One of our earliest and most widely replicated findings is that reminders of death increase nationalism and other forms of group identification, making people more accepting of those who are similar to themselves and more hostile toward those who are different."